AMD has talked to some of its favourite journalists and wants to prepare them for the European Cayman launch that should take place on December 15th, exactly seven days from now.

Some of the lucky ones got the cards that they are testing them as we speak, while partners should have the cards ready to ship early next week. We got a hint about the performance, and we will settle for that.

AMD's own benchmarketing data claims that Cayman XT is slightly below 20 percent faster than a GTX 480 in 3Dmark Vantage. When we compare our own GTX 480 results and add 20 percent on top of that it turns that Cayman XT loses to both GTX 570 and especially GTX 580.

It looks like AMD has big gains versus GTX 480 in all OpenGL games including ET Quake Wars, Wolfenstein MP and Chronicles of Riddick, quite old games if you ask us. It is around 20 percent faster than the GTX 480 in these games.

In HAWX 2 Radeon HD 6970 is some 15 percent faster than the GTX 480, and in Dirt 2 it is over 15 percent faster. When we compare the scores we have with this game and GTX 480 and add additional 15 percent we don’t see it beating the GTX 580, but it gets close.

The smallest gain is in Far Cry 2 with only a few percent faster than GTX 480, following with World in Conflict where ATI is below 10 percent faster and Metro 2033 where ATI wins by slightly over 10 percent, again vs GTX 480.

There might be some cases where Radeon HD 6970 will be able to beat the GTX 580, but the first impression is that Nvidia should end up slightly faster in most games.

Update:

It appears that our usually well informed source failed us, and forwarded a photoshopped roadmap. So, we plainly got served. We are in the process of gathering more reliable info on Cayman performance and we will write an update as soon as we get something worthwhile. It will clearly end up quite a bit faster and we apologize for the inconvenience.

We got some rough Geforce GTX 580 performance figures and they indicate that the new card could be as much as 15 to 20 percent faster than the old GF100-based Geforce GTX 480.

This is something that we'd expected from the tweaked and fixed GF100 chip. The core architecture is slightly changed in order to make this GPU more efficient and to lower the TDPs, at least slightly.

The general idea was to stay at a similar TDP and get much more performance, per watt of course. Since this is one of the biggest chips ever built, or should we say re-spun from the GF100, you have to know by now that it will get hot and fast, but so do any of the products in this market range.

Also bear in mind that both companies still have dual-chip cards in the pipeline and they should end up even faster. If we only had such cool content to really need so much processing power.

Today we’ll finish up our talk on GTX 480 Beast, a card that’s anything but ordinary, which again isn’t a surprise considering that Point of View and TGT teams are behind it. GTX 480 Beast is special for its higher operating clocks, which means better performance as well as higher pricing. GTX 480 Beast card is already famous for its performance and we’re currently looking at the fastest factory-clocked GTX 480 card; GPU runs at 810MHz whereas GDDR5 memory runs at 950MHz (3800MHz effectively). Unfortunately, the price of €661 will definitely make some users reconsider a purchase. Note however that the card comes significantly overclocked, has a water block that will do a world of good for cooling and noise levels and to top it all off, it’s covered by warranty.

Point of View / TGT recently started their overclocking endeavors, and already the Beast series is proudly sitting as the fastest of all GTX 480 cards. Beast moniker is found only on the fastest, crème of the crop cards, whereas the slower ones come with Ultra Charged and Charged monikers. Note that only the GTX 480 Beast comes with a water block – the rest use reference cooling.

GTX 480 card was announced more than six months ago, so Point of View / TGT perhaps comes a bit late. On the other hand, since TGT team is only warming up, we’re anxious to see their future products arriving in time, which was the case with GTX 460 Beast/Ultra Charged/Charged cards.

Point of View / TGT GTX 480 Beast uses Innovatek’s water cooling block – Cool-Matic GTX 480. You can purchase this block separately for €199, and it has been specially designed for cooling GTX 480 cards. Furthermore, Cool-Matic will not only take care of cooling the GPU, but the memory and power circuitry as well. We’ve already heard rumors about Cool-Matic GTX 480, but it appears like Innovatek hesitated because of low demand for GTX 480 water blocks. Fortunately, it seems like orders from Point of View / TGT have remedied that and played a significant role in launching the product.

Cool-Matic GTX 480 cooler has 137 parts (including the screws) and is in direct contact with the PCB at no less than 59 points.

Innovatek uses the new Injektor PRO technology making the water block internals more complex, but in turn providing improved cooling performance. On its own, Cool-Matic GTX 480 costs about €199 although when we first wrote about GTX 480 a few weeks ago, it was listed on Innovatek’s page with a €189 price tag.

GTX 480 Beast is a dual slot card, and the following picture clearly shows that the water block is more than one slot wide.

Just like the reference card, the GTX 480 Beast is powered via one 6-pin and one 8-pin connector.

3DMark Vantage rates the GTX 480 Beast as much as 31% faster than the reference GTX 480. GTX 480 Beast is the fastest single-GPU card and while it's capable of beating the HD 5870 by up to 37%, dual-GPU HD 5970 clearly takes the cake in 3DMark Vantage.

Aliens vs Predator

In this game, GTX 480 Beast outruns the reference GTX 480 by up to 12%. The difference between the GTX 480 Beast and dual-GPU HD 5970 is lower in antialiasing tests and even lower after we pushed the resolution; at 2560x1600 the difference is 12% whereas 1920x1080 results in 16% difference.

Dirt 2

Dirt 2 at 1920x1080 sees the GTX 480 Beast outrun the dual-GPU HD 5970, but the aforementioned card retakes the lead at 2560x1600. Reference GTX 480 is slower than its beastly cousin by 12%.

Metro 2033

This game sees the highest difference between the reference and Beast GTX 480 cards – 16,5%. At 2560x1600, Radeon HD 5870 runs slower than GTX 480 by 58%, whereas the dual-GPU HD 5970 runs on par with GTX 480 Beast.

Tesselation test - Unigine Heaven v2.1

The distinguishing feature of this benchmark is hardware tessellation, a scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces, so that games gain drastically detailed and more elaborated look almost free of charge in terms of performance. Tessellation feature REQUIRES both video card with DirectX 11 support and MS Windows Vista/7!

There are three tessellation modes available in this version of the benchmark:

Moderate Mode : This mode is targeted to provide reasonable performance on a wide range of DX11 hardware.

Extreme Mode : It is designed to meet the perspectives of the next series of DX11-capable hardware pushing up the tessellation level to the extreme in the next 1-2 years.Source, unigine.com

Tesselation test - TessMark

TessMark is an OpenGL 4 benchmark. That means you can play with GPU tessellation under Windows XP, Vista and Seven. Of course, you need a GeForce GTX 400 series or a Radeon HD 5000 Series. No GPU tessellation with previous generation of graphics cards!

Like Unigine Heaven, TessMark allows to select the level tessellation. The small difference is that TessMark proposes four differents levels (moderate, normal, extreme and insane), source geeks3d.com / oZone3D.net

FurMark is a very intensive OpenGL benchmark for the graphics card. The benchmark offers several options allowing the user to tweak the rendering: fullscreen / windowed mode, MSAA selection, window size, duration.

Increased graphics workload / power draw of FurMark 1.8.0 for all new graphics monsters such as HD 5870, HD 5970 or new GTX 480, leads to less FPS and lower scores compared to FurMark 1.7.0, source oZone3D.net / geeks3D.com

Overclocking, Consumption, Thermals

Of course, many will want to know about GPU temperatures, as this hasn’t quite been the selling point of GTX 480 cards. Our today’s card however, comes with water cooling, which promises to change that. The water cooling system included a PPS Plus 12V Pump (Innovatek / Eheim) and a radiator with three silent Ebm-Papst 4412 F/2GL fans.

Power consumption and performance-per-watt ratio on GTX 480 cards have received more than enough criticism and the following table shows exactly why. It’s perfectly normal and expected for an overclocked GTX 480 Beast to draw more power than the reference GTX 480, although we must admit we’re still hoping that Nvidia’s next generation high end cards will draw less power.

We used default voltages during our testing, which on the GTX 480 Beast’s GPU were at 1100mV.

The following photo shows GPU temperatures during FurMark testing. Note that this is the worst case scenario solely for testing purposes, and you’re not likely to replicate this in everyday work.

The GTX 480 Beast ran stable at 880MHz GPU and 4300MHz memory, and all that without meddling with voltages.

Pushing the voltage to 1125mV did just enough to make the GPU run stable at 895MHz, with GPU temperatures staying at 68°C. 1138mV didn’t change the scenario and not even 1150mV helped the GPU run stable beyond 895MHz.

Conclusion

A few days ago, Point of View / TGT launched the GTX 480 Beast, a card that comes factory overclocked to 810MHz GPU and 950MHz memory (3800MHz effectively). The overclock resulted in up to 14% better performance compared to the reference card, making our today’s test sample the fastest GTX 480 around. The benefits of water cooling and improved performance does not come without a cost though, and and you’ll have to splash out about €661, here. Note that such high pricing is for the most part Innovatek’s “fault”, as their Cool-Matic GTX 480 block costs €199 when purchased separately.

The GTX 480 is already known for its high consumption and pretty high noise levels, and while GTX 480 Beast will solve the noise and thermals, the consumption is naturally even higher. Whether this is the perfect card for you is naturally not ours to say. What we can tell you, though, is that the GTX 480 is currently the fastest single-GPU card around, which means that it will take anything you throw at it in stride, regardless of whether it’s demanding games or PhysX and CUDA apps.

MSI has introduced the GTX 480 Twin Frozr II, which is basically a GF100 card with a proper cooler on top.

MSI’s Twin Frozr series cards sport massive heatpipe coolers and the GTX 480 is no exception. The 5-heatpipe cooler, which features two 8mm SuperPipes, reduces the temps by 14C and noise is also cut by 4dB. This is no small feat if you consider that a reference GTX 480 uses more power than a third world village and that it would probably make Beelzebub sweat like a pig.

Despite the massive cooler, MSI apparently chose to stick to reference clocks, so the GPU is clocked at 700MHz, shaders run at 1401MHz and the 1536MB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 924MHz.

We already talked about Point of View / TGT’s plans for launching the BEAST version of GTX 480, and the card was announced to come with the highest GTX 480 clocks on the market. There was talk about the GPU running at 800MHz, but we can now confirm that the GTX 480 BEAST’s ticker runs at 810MHz. We have the card and we did a few preliminary tests just to get you going until we finalize the full review.

As you can see from the photo, the water block covers the entire card together with the power components, memory and the GPU. This means extra cooling and, naturally, improved stability at high factory clocks. While the reference GPU runs at 700MHz and the memory at 3696MHz, GTX 480 BEAST’s GPU runs at 810MHz for the GPU and 3800MHz for the memory.

The GTX 480 BEAST’s water block is new as well and comes from Innovatek.

This model has just been announced and dubbed Cool-Matic GTX 480 with JetStream technology. This cooler can be ordered at a price of €189 (+ shipping), here. The block is expensive, but Injektor PRO technology, with specially designed internals, provides lower temperatures and higher overclocking potential. Seeing the price of this water block suddenly explains why PoV/TGT priced the card at €699, but we can’t overlook the fact that a GPU running at 810MHz right out of the box, as this isn’t quite an usual occurence.

The temperatures on the card are 20-30°C lower than on the reference card, with the results being higher by up to 15%.

We tested the card using a triple radiator with 12cm fans; finally, a silent GTX 480 card. Stay tuned as we’ll have the full review soon.

In Aliens vs. Predator, GTX 480 Beast beats the reference card by up to 12%, whereas in tesselation tests, where Nvidia usually takes the cake, we see the GTX 480 BEAST outrunning AMD’s HD 5970.

It’s been a few months since we’ve heard about Point of View and TGT Tuning team’s joint efforts on overclocking graphics cards. So far, the work has paid off and the offspring, GTX 460 BEAST, already has the title of the fastest factory overclocked GTX 460. Now that the dust has settled around the aforementioned card, we’re ready to talk about other cards in the offer. Today, we’re talking about GTX 480, so far the fastest Nvidia DirectX 11 card which, with a little help from TGT team, runs like the wind.

Unlike the reference card where the GPU runs at 700MHz, shaders at 1400MHz and the memory at 3700MHz, Point of View/TGT Ultra Charged card runs at 763MHz for the GPU, 1536MHz for the shaders and 3800MHz for the memory.

GTX 480 was announced at the end of March and can currently be found at about €400. GTX 480 Ultra Charged card, which we’re discussing today, is priced at about €460, here .

We’re talking about a really powerful graphics card with plenty of potential. The stronghold of this chip is tessellation, a very important part of DirectX 11 and this is what this chip is really good at. Unfortunately, the potential has been severely limited by high temperatures and cooling noise. It has long been noted that with adequate cooling, the GTX 480 can run much, much better, and partners naturally heard the call. Point of View and TGT team are preparing a water cooled GTX 480 card with a JetStream block that will carry the branding BEAST. We hear that the GPU clock will run at 800MHz but it’s quite possible that we’ll see even higher clocks as water cooling usually joins silence and efficient cooling.

In case you don’t fancy water cooling but still want a faster card, Point of View and TGT team still have you covered as they offer two GTX 480 Ultra Charged cards. The card we have on our test today features reference PCB design and reference cooling whereas the other card comes with Arctic Cooling’s cooler, which naturally means lower temperatures and lower noise levels. Those who’ve tried the GTX 480 know that the card is too loud and too hot even at reference clocks.

We must admit we’ve been surprised by GTX 480 Ultra Charged card’s overclocking potential. We had no trouble pushing the GPU to 850MHz and get 15-20% higher performance compared to the reference card.

The following photos show the two Point of View / TGT Ultra Charged cards.Geforce GTX 480 UC is a dual-slot card, which is common with high end cards, but it is not quite common seeing a reference design with a heatpipe solution. In an effort to deliver thermals that would satisfy the GTX 480’s hot ticker, most of the card’s “hood” is actually the heatsink itself. A glance at Geforce GTX 480 would suggest that the card comes with 4 heatpipes, although the card packs 5 in total.

GTX 480 has TDP of 250W (at idle consumes about 55W) and it needs external power via one 8-pin and one 6-pin connector. The I/O panel features two standard dual link DVI outs as well as one miniHDMI. The card packs a total of 1536MB of GDDR5 memory.

The triple-fan cooler features a total of five heatpipes and 84 fins combined with copper block and three ultra quiet 92mm PWM fans with low noise impeller.

The new POV/TGT "Made in Germany" GTX 480 UltraCharged TFC card should be available in retail/e-tail as of September 20th.

Overclocking

Point of View / TGT GTX 480 Ultra Charged is a factory overclocked card that currently boasts the title of the fastest GTX 480 we’ve tested so far. Unlike the reference card where the GPU runs at 700MHz, shaders at 1400MHz and the memory at 3700MHz, Point of View/TGT Ultra Charged card runs at 763MHz for the GPU, 1536MHz for the shaders and 3800MHz for the memory.

TGT team is in charge of overclocking and of course handpicking the best GF100 chips, the ones capable of hitting 850MHz. Our sample, for instance, has no problem running at 850MHz. We didn’t meddle with voltages nor manual RPM settings; all we did was push a slider in MSI’s Afterburner. The memory ran at 1050MHz (4200MHz effectively), except in Unigine Heaven 1920x1080 Extreme Tesselation test. The results you’ll see on the following tables are measured with the GPU running at 850MHz and memory at 1025MHz (4100MHz effectively).

Of course, overclocking the card almost exclusively means higher noise levels, but you should know by now that the cooler is pretty loud, even on reference cards. Consumption increased as well – our test rig strapped with a reference GTX 480 drew maximum 515W; GTX 480 UC pushed this figure to 525W while our overclock resulted in the rig consuming up to 560W.

The following results show results after overclocking. You’ll notice that the GTX 480 UC OC faster than the reference card by 15% to 20%.

3DMark Vantage

Aliens vs Predator

PoV/TGT GTX 480 Ultra Charged outruns the reference GTX 480 by 7%. The difference between the cards was even more evident after overclocking PoV/TGT card as it managed an 18% lead over the reference card.

Dirt 2

PoV/TGT GTX 480 Ultra Charged outruns the reference GTX 480 by 7%.

Metro 2033

FurMark

Unigine Heaven v2.1

Conclusion

We must admit that it was pretty refreshing to test a GTX 480 that can be overclocked without much hassle. On the other hand, knowing that it’s a Point of View / TGT GTX 480 Ultra Charged, it wasn’t much of a surprise either. TGT handpicked the crème of the crop GF100 chips and used them on GTX 480 Ultra Charged cards. Hitting 800MHz for the GPU should be a piece of cake for any of these cards. We seem to have been lucky as we managed to push our sample to 850MHz, with no trouble whatsoever, but we can't guarantee that all samples can do that.

Point of View / TGT GTX 480 Ultra Charged is about 7% faster than the reference GTX 480 card and is the fastest factory overclocked GTX 480 we’ve tested so far. After our overclocking, the card scored 15-20% higher than the reference card.

GTX 480 Ulta Chaged runs at 763MHz for the GPU and 950MHz for the memory (3800MHz effectively). The card comes in two flavors – our today’s sample comes with Nvidia’s reference cooling and PoV sticker whereas 20th of September will see the launch of GTX 480 Ultra Charged card with Arctic cooling’s solution. Naturally, you can expect lower temperatures as well as lower noise levels with this card. We must admit we didn’t like the reference cooling, which tends to get pretty loud, and we’re hoping that the new Ultra Charged card won’t be much pricier than our today’s card, which is available at about €460, here.

Performance wise, however, the GTX 480 UC is a beast and will allow for gaming virtually anything. If you don’t mind the noise and the pretty high consumption, then this is the card for you. In case you find the noise to be important, you can wait a bit longer for the GTX 480 Ultra Charged card with Arctic Cooling’s solution as well as the water cooler GTX 480 Beast.

Point of View and TGT Tuning have rolled out its latest addition to the GTX 400 series, the POV/TGT Geforce GTX 480 Ultra Charged Triple-Fan-Cooling. This triple-slot behemoth is factory overclocked to 763MHz for the GPU and features Arctic Cooling's Accelero Xtreme Plus cooler in order to be as silent as posible.

POV/TGT GTX 480 Ultra Charged works at 763MHz for the core, 1526MHz for shaders and 3800MHz for 1536MB of GDDR5 memory. Note that the card only has a 3MHz higher clock than the regular POV/TGT GTX 480 Ultra Charged, but in turn should be much cooler and most importantly a lot more quieter.

The triple-slot, triple-fan cooler features a total of five heatpipes and 84 fins combined with copper block and three ultra quiet 92mm PWM fans with low noise impeller.

The new POV/TGT "Made in Germany" GTX 480 UltraCharged TFC card should be available in retail/e-tail as of September 20th.

Update: POV/TGT informed us that the card takes up only two slots and that it supports SLI. Unfortunately, according to what we can see on the picture, the card takes at least "two and a half slots" and we are pretty sure that, although SLI might be possible on some motherboards, some motherboards might have a slight room problems.

During MSI's MOA (Master Overclocking Arena) 2010 finals, guys from TechSweden.org managed to get some one-on-one time with MSI's latest Lightning series addition, the MSI N480GTX Lightning card. The newest N480GTX Lightning is a beefed up GTX 480 with special PCB and the latest version of the TwinFrozr cooler.

Under the TwinFrozr III cooler, which features two 90mm fans, five heatpipes and a backplate, is the special PCB that has 17-phase VRM, four super ML Poadlizer capcitors and high-C capacitors. The card works at 750MHz for the GPU, 1500MHz for 480 CUDA cores and 4000MHz for 1.5GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 384-bit memory interface.

The rest of the features include a V-check points, DIP switches, two DVIs, HDMI, DisplayPort, and the card requires two 8-pin and one 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors to run. According to the guys at TechSweden, the card should show up in retail with a price tag set at US $550, which isn't that bad considering the features that it should offer.

We are quite sure that MSI will share more info in the upcoming days, but until then, you can check out the preview with more pictures over at TechSweden.org.

In order to keep the hype going until Nvidia comes out with a new chip, MSI is working on some new cards that should show up pretty soon and give its competition a run for its money. MSI is going to launch a custom version of GTX 480 and GTX 460 cards and names like Lightning and Hawk are pretty much something that we already seen from MSI.

The first one that will be announced is the GTX 480 HydroGen, a water-cooled GTX 480 that will have a decent overclocking potential and most probably a nice factory overclock. Paired up with MSI's Afterburner overclocking utility, this one might break a record or two in the right hands.

The next one is the GTX 460 Hawk, a custom GTX 460 that has been mentioned and rumoured for quite some time. This one will most probably end up with Twin Frozr II cooler, and should have a quite good overclocking potential as well. Despite its 675MHz clock, the card should easily achieve 800MHz and even over with some voltage tweaking. The GTX 460 Hawk will use MSI's Military class components, will need two 6-pin PCI-Express power connecotrs and will have a voltage measure points. The card should be available this month if all goes well.

The last but not least is the MSI GTX 480 Lightning, a top notch GTX 480 prepared exclusively for overclocking. The card should be similar to previously released Lightning cards, which means that it will shine at overclocking and when paired up with a bunch of LN2 should give out great results. This one is planned sometimes later, and as MSI's MOA finals are coming soon we are sure that MSI will have it ready by then.

The guys from Expreview.com somehow managed to get their hands on Nvidia's GF100 with all 512 stream processors, or as Nvidia calls them today, CUDA cores. Back when it was announced, the GF100 appeared on the GTX 480 card, but only slightly crippled, with 480 SPs, and it looks like that Expreview.com scored the reason why Nvidia never announced the full 512SP card and probably never will.

Although the numbers seems a bit odd considering that the 512SP card is about five percent faster in average and at the same time has a power consumption of over 200W more under load when compared to the GTX 480. We have no reason not to take those numbers seriously. We are sure that even the guys from Expreview rechecked those scores, but it looks like that the fully enabled GF100 just doesn't make sense.

Despite the large triple-fan cooler running at 92 percent, the card managed to hit 94 degrees Celsius, which is practically insane considering the sheer size of the cooler.

It is still unclear if such a card will ever be available and if Nvidia will ever stand behind such a card, but one thing is clear, it just doesn't make sense. (And it could very easily fall under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. sub.ed.)